pyesetz | The Sound(s) of Silence

Since you were all so unimpressed with my previous song review of a Chris Carabba tune, here is some Paul Simon. It’s from Simon & Garfunkel’s début 1964 album. It did not sell well until it was overdubbed in 1965 and then it topped the charts. Simon has described this song as “about the inability to communicate”. Here is a nice instrumental cover.

Hello, darkness, my old friend
I've come to talk with you again: • These lines have become a meme, signifying that life generally isn’t going your way and you are feeling sort of down.
• The narrator refers to the darkness as a “friend” because he has talked to it in the past, not necessarily because he likes it.
• When I was an undergrad, living in the dorms, there were many occasions where someone that I knew barely or not at all would walk up to me and say that some third-party person (whom I also knew barely or not at all) was “my friend”. What sense of “friend” could they possibly mean? Eventually I figured out that these “friends” were people who wanted to have a play-fight and/or sex with me. I did not take any of these offers. I do not play-fight.
Because a vision softly creeping
Left its seeds while I was sleeping
And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains: • This is “prophetic vision”, which doesn’t use the eyes but just the visual cortex.
• I’m not big on visions. I’m more of an audio kind of guy.
Within the sound of silence: • Here we introduce the concept of pseudoprofound bullshit, which apparently did not have a name until ᴀᴅ 2015. How can a vision remain within a sound?
• What is the sound of silence? There is a “sound of sudden silence,” or hush, which is the feeling of your body’s automatic gain control rising to counteract the loss of input volume, leading to a momentary awareness of the pulsing of blood in your ears, tinnitus, etc.
In restless dreams I walked alone
Narrow streets of cobblestone: • In real life I have walked alone down many narrow streets, but rarely of cobblestone. Asphalt is nicer, but concrete is pretty good.
• What’s it like to have a dream of yourself walking? Do you see what yourself-walking would see? Are you hovering above and behind yourself, seeing yourself walk? Or is there no visual element at all and you just *know* that you are walking? That’s how my dreams go.
'Neath the halo of a streetlamp
I turned my collar to the cold and damp: • Many movies have a scene where the protagonist turns up his collar against the cold, in order to suggest that he is feeling friendless (= emotionally cold). See for example Peter Kingsbery.
• Another dorm story: one time I was walking along a street I rarely travelled, going to a pizza shop I rarely visited, when I chanced upon a grad student of my acquaintance, walking back from that same pizza shop having already eaten! We stood for awhile, talking about electronics. It was dusk and the streetlamp over our heads turned on during the conversation.
• A few weeks later, there were cops in my room demanding to know why I had vandalized the football stadium. They said someone had seen me do it, around dusk on a certain day. I told them I was somewhere else at that time and the proof was the streetlamp turning on. Like every other time the cops showed up, nothing came of it and I graduated without a police record.
• The cops apparently talked to that grad student to get him to confirm my story. The grad student apparently hated cops because of something that had happened to him back home in Egypt. He never spoke to me again.
• I actually had been hanging around the football stadium that day, getting stoned by myself, leading to the trip down that rarely-trodden street. To this day I think that my accuser (whose name I never learned) did the vandalism himself, then blamed me because he had seen me there and knew my name but nothing else about me (which is the case with most of the people who know my name, since I’m not big on sitting around talking).
When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of a neon light
That split the night: • The narrator lives in a cold world of painful technology.
• In the 1960’s, neon lights were garish and overly bright. When they got old they couldn’t stay lit and would flicker like a strobe light.
And touched the sound of silence: • This song is an LSD trip. These combinations of sense-impressions are pseudo-profound, unless we define “the sound of silence” as meaning “soul”.
And in the naked light I saw
Ten thousand people, maybe more: • The word “naked” here seems to connect with “touch” in the previous line.
• Usually it would be the lamp that is naked (unshaded), causing the light to be harsh. This couplet seems to be a flight of fancy, where the neon flash illuminates the naked desperation of the ten thousand.
• Ten thousand people is a myriad, which seems like a ridiculously small size-estimate for the set of people who hear the Sound of Silence, or who follow the Code of Silence (which might be a similar set, but whose problems cannot be blamed on omnipresent advertising).
People talking without speaking
People hearing without listening: • You might think this is some sort of positive statement about deaf people, but I don’t think it’s supposed to mean that. I would prefer that it were some sort of statement about nonverbal communication between people, but I suspect it isn’t that, either. Rather, it’s people talking to the darkness inside their heads because they have no one else to talk to.
People writing songs that voices never share
No one dared: • If you never write it down, then it will remain forever beautiful in your head because it never has to face the light of day. Pierre de Fermat apparently went to his grave with confidence that he had a proof for his last theorem, which he never bothered to write down. Andrew Wiles’ work centuries later suggests that Fermat couldn’t possibly have had a valid proof, given the limited tools available to him, so probably he had one of the invalid ones. But we’ll never know.
• This essay seemed much more profound in my head before I wrote it down. I usually decide, after writing this sort of thing, that I shouldn’t have bothered because it doesn’t accomplish anything.
• Why does “no one dare“? Because they are afraid to show themselves.
• Many people have complained over the years that I keep my light under a bushel. I have several times had the experience where if I just burst into song while walking down the street, some random passer-by would decide to punch me, because with a voice like that I must surely love play-fighting! They were surprised when I inexplicably didn’t want to fight with them.
Disturb the sound of silence: • “Disturb” is a reasonable verb to use with “silence”, unlike the others in this song.
"Fools," said I, "You do not know
Silence like a cancer grows: • No evidence is provided for this assertion.
• There is something to be said for remaining Comfortably Numb.
Hear my words that I might teach you
Take my arms that I might reach you.": • None of the people who have said stuff like this to me over the years have been successful. A few people have managed to reach me, but not the ones who talked like this.
• Harlow’s monkey experiment showed that an early lack of cuddles leads to a lifelong lack of desire for touch. Unlike the monkeys in that experiment, I actually did have a mother; I just didn’t want her hugs in particular. See Reactive Attachment Disorder.
But my words like silent raindrops fell
And echoed in the wells of silence: • Have you ever had the experience where you say something out loud, while alone on a walk, and the only reply is an echo from a nearby culvert, serving to emphasize how little other sound there is in your environment? Or maybe the culvert noise emphasizes that no one else could possibly have heard you.
• LSD is a hell of a drug. Steve Jobs was a big fan of it. He invented the iPhone.
And the people bowed and prayed
To the neon god they made: • It was popular in the 50’s and 60’s to blame the increasing alienation on the omnipresence of technology and chintzy commercialism (the “neon god”).
• Some sources say that Paul Simon wrote this song, one line per day, over a period of six months. That can’t be true because the song doesn’t have 183 lines. I have no idea how many LSD trips Mr. Simon went on during the extended composing period, but apparently that was something he was doing at the time.
And the sign flashed out its warning
In the words that it was forming
And the sign said, "The words of the prophets
Are written on the subway walls: • More pseudoprofound bullshit. Most words on subway walls are advertisements. Many others are commands to behave properly. A few are graffiti of the form “Kilroy was here”.
And tenement halls: • I think most words in tenement hallways are commands from the landlord that tenants must obey under threat of eviction. Quotes from the Nevi’im are probably rare.
• I find this line hard to hear in the official recording. Instead of “and tenement halls” I just hear “telling all”.
And whispered in the sounds of silence.: • The song ends on a decrescendo, hence “whisper”.
• What could it mean that the words of the prophets are whispered in the sounds of silence? Is that just more bullshit, or do you hear God when spending time alone with Nature?